Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Ray Robinson, who writes:
Hi, Thomas. In the 2019 movie Ford v. Ferrari, a battered old shortwave radio is used in California to listen to commentary on the 1966 Le Mans race from France.
I’ve attached a few stills from the movie (which I highly recommend, by the way). Might any of your subscribers know the model of the radio?
Post Readers: Please comment with links if you can ID the make and model of this radio. It looks very familiar, but then again the design is similar to so many other models of the era. Ray, I look forward to checking out the film, too!
I *THINK* it’s R-2500 derived – same circuit, re-organised knobs/box. Many of these went out in lots of different configurations. I think my dad had one to repair in Bermuda in 1969.
It is a Toshiba 590RA
Good job!
Gosh! Well done. I had a much smaller Tosh and it half passed my mind that there was a family similarity. These Japanese radios were certainly plentiful!
Appears to be a Japanese made “National” similar to one I saw back in the Marine Corps while stationed there.
The brand logo on the lower left is “National” which is a Panasonic brand. Looking around it looks consistent with 1960s or early 70’s vintage. A google crawl did not yield any photos of this particular radio though.
Agreed it looks like the older “National” logo (which was a Matsushita Electric brand) – which is odd, since afaik Matsushita didn’t use the National brand in North America at first. When they first entered that market in the early 60’s they were branded “Panasonic”, since “National” was already trademarked. It wasn’t I think until the 70’s that the “National” brand was used by Matsushita Electric in the US – and I think it was only as part of “National Panasonic”.
Around the same time or a bit later Matsushita Electric started using the Panasonic name in Europe, then the rest of the world, before finally renaming themselves Panasonic in the late 00’s.
So while not impossible to see a National radio in a mid-60’s Californian setting, it’s a bit of an anachronism…